by Chris Dennis
This would turn out to be a miserable, violent point of contention later in their lives, after they’d gone broke and were old and separated and her primary source of income came from his meager disability benefits. She’d continue to mention it long after he’d entered the nursing home, and even then he couldn’t bring himself to admit she’d been right. Of course, his memory was eaten up and licked clean. Retribution rarely produced the rewards one hoped for.
“Do they think they’re supposed to train us?” she’d whisper to her husband when the couple was around but out of earshot. He swatted her away with a wide, sharp cleaver flecked with fat.
“And these machines never gave us a bit of trouble,” the couple said, gesturing toward the meat grinders. “They must be rinsed properly of an evening, or else there’s a greater risk of malfunction. And the smokehouse must be sanitized.”
The wife thought she was going to tear her own eyes out. The couple’s pulsating voices enraged her. It was as if the two spoke on some rare frequency that triggered an area in her brain that longed for fantastic acts of torture.
“Now we’ve told you when the services are, right?” the lady said at the end of these visits. “So all that’s left is for you to come! Oh, our pastor is truly touched. A true man of God! There’s no excuse for you and your husband to say no.”
Except the wife could think of nothing but. Even after so many months.
“We’re buried these days! Business has really taken off,” she reminded them, and it had. People from five counties were bringing their cows and hogs to be slaughtered and processed, and everyone poured out the compliments, especially regarding the sausage, and the transparency of prices. Every animal that came through the door was made as tranquil as a forest before the kill, they reminded the customers, assuring the most tender product. They’d even begun administering electroshock treatments to the beef, further tenderizing the carcass, a process that captivated the wife—watching the dead animal’s muscles contract and relax each time the machine was switched on.
“Well, we had it going pretty good ourselves, but in the end we decided being full-time Christians was more important. A lot goes on in a true house of God that people don’t know about!”
“I bet,” the wife said, reeling.
The problem was that too many of the less conservative customers had already confessed an unnamable distrust of the couple. Was it their matching voices and coordinated clothes? One thing was, people questioned if the animal they’d brought in was the butchered animal they collected on the other end. Also, people claimed, the weights seemed incorrect. Most of all, it was the communal suspicion surrounding the church’s decision to pull all of their children out of the local school to be enrolled in a private program owned by the church.
“Thanks must be given. Come show your appreciation!” the lady said to the wife.
“We should thank you for how well our business is doing?” the wife responded.
“Oh, mercy no! Not us, in particular. Your heavenly father! Praise God for the blessings he’s allowed you. Come give thanks to God almighty!”
Hers had been a hard life. She’d always had trouble understanding other people’s faith. Praise or penance never seemed to yield the same results as backbreaking labor, in her experience. So she just said it, and that was the glimmering pinnacle: “As far as I can tell, we’re the ones in here twelve hours a day, working our hands to the bone. So I’ll just thank myself, if you don’t mind.”
The lady backed up a few steps, opening her mouth wider than the wife thought possible. The uvula was dark red and swollen. “We have no intention of permitting an atheist to run our business!” she finally managed to say, putting her hands up in front of her, as if warding off an attack.
“Well, it’s too late for that. It’s already been sold to us. And I think you should leave.”
That evening while the husband lay in bed sweating, boiling over her intolerance and the thought of the lesbians next door, his wife stood out in the yard beside the old water pump, breathing heavily under a sky busted apart with stars, smelling the rancid hay in the fields, gazing across the acres at a blurry spot along the fence where she was certain she saw someone standing, staring back at her in the dark. Perhaps there were two silhouettes, even, holding hands by the gravel road? Her housedress whipped around her legs in the breeze and her mind leaped forward many decades to a vision of her adult children sitting before her on an elegantly decorated sunporch, both of them making a depressed, pathetic case for why they wanted nothing to do with their father. “He never loved us unconditionally!” they exclaimed. “He didn’t provide a nurturing environment!” They had unhealthy adult bodies, and malformed child-faces. This whole exchange would come to pass, subtracting the part about the sunporch and adding the latent disgust they eventually extended to her too, ducking her embrace whenever she reached for them, which was often. She’d remember this night in the yard and her vague premonition of the children delivering back to their father the selfish negligence he’d sowed into their child-hearts. This accordion of memories would leave her feeling fated and alive and connected to every detail—the sharpening rod on the stoop, the red chiggers swarming on the well, the bark peeling off the birches, the crowded nettles. Of the moment in the country when everything fell apart. The endless growl from the electric engine of an oil horse in the field behind the sodomites’ ranch style brought her back. She went inside and slipped under the sheets next to her husband, who was playing over in his pre-sleep the inevitable argument he’d have with his wife when he finally told her he was, in fact, only leasing the slaughterhouse, and the option to buy was contingent on a list of indecipherable stipulations that he’d hardly even read, having been so eager to escape the city and begin the messy, glorious business of killing animals on a farm.
Perhaps he was an idiot after all.
“Are we supposed to be polite to them now?” she asked him. He hadn’t said a word to her all day. This wasn’t uncommon. They were leaning over the stainless industrial sink, scrubbing dried blood from under their fingernails. “They don’t even strike me as the type to get their hands dirty!” she said. “How did they ever manage a slaughterhouse?”
“How do you think? They had mutual respect! They honored each other,” he said, looking at his bloody apron.
As it turned out, they were indeed the type to get their hands dirty. Or at least the type to pay someone else to get their hands dirty for them. Filthy, actually, because the husband and wife returned from a cattle auction a week later to find the entire killing floor flooded with sewage. The septic tank had backed up and seeped beneath the locker room door, filling the place with the smell of shit, ruining all the uncured meat. They had to pay back the price of all the hogs and cattle that were contaminated.
“We’re in deep now!” the husband said, throwing his rubber gloves at her, going for the phone. “You’re going to call and fix this. You’re going to that church.”
“You want me to pray over a backed-up septic tank? When did you turn so pious?” She could see the bile spilling over his face in response to her having used a word he didn’t know. “Religious!” she said. “For God sakes.”
“The moment those two walked into our house and invited us to church. Now you’re going to call them, ask for the name of their plumber, tell them you’re a stupid person and we’ll see them at the next service.”
“What have you done?” she said coldly. “What do we owe? What kind of dirty deal did you strike?”
“We’ll lose this place!” he screamed, spit flying from his mouth, his eyes going bloodshot.
“Good riddance,” she said, wading out of the putrid waste, using the mop to clear a slimy path before her.
He tried to make amends with the couple. She could hear them both on the other end of the phone when he called, speaking sedately in their twin voices, saying how sorry they were to hear of
the sad trouble that had befallen the business. “Satan is a cunning thief,” they said. “Have you considered that the disturbed neighbors are possibly to blame? Those deviants?” they asked.
He had considered that. “It’s a little closer to home though,” the husband said after hanging up, eyeing his wife with teeth-grinding contempt.
“It’s them you should be angry at, you old fool! Or yourself. Not me!”
“It’s Satan, all right,” he said to her. “Lucifer herself!” He pitched a jar of meat jelly at her from the kitchen doorway. It went sailing past, crashing against the wall, where it dripped sluggishly down the floral paper.
The next week the water heater exploded, damaging the entire south end of the house. A few days after that, the propane tank acquired a leak, leaving them without gas to cook a meal. For the final, exhausting toll, a health inspector showed up to do a full review of the facilities, announcing a list that included over ten thousand dollars’ worth of necessary renovations in order for them to remain in operation. They had five days to comply, or else close the doors. “God bless,” the inspector said, as he bowed his head beside the lard vat.
Later that day, as he wrapped up the last hog’s leg, the husband whispered to her, tenderly almost, “You’ve cursed us.”
The first moment she had to herself, she snuck up into the attic alone to embroider in a broken easy chair. The hypnotic rhythm of precise work allowed her to slide below her own imagination, the whole history of the world, even, to a place where a woman didn’t need a husband. The peaceful, slippery dream didn’t last long. It was nearly visible though. Was it his disgust she feared? Sure, his blood curdled at the thought of taking advice from her. He couldn’t help that. It was purely physical. But when she finally tried to explain, on the ride home from their lawyer’s office, he turned and spit on her. “Oops,” he said as they stared at the gooey clots of chewing tobacco on her legs and shoes.
“I put flour under all of the doormats at night and every time we left the house,” she said. “And every time when we came back I lifted the mats to find footprints in the flour. They’ve been coming in our house and the business since we moved here.”
He hated her for being clever, more than anything.
And as it turned out the old lockbox had a gun in it. Why didn’t she know about that? After the children had gone to sleep, he sat beside her in bed holding the pistol, running the tip of it up her arm, and then her cheek. The air conditioner had just quit working and the heat was so thick they were floating in it. He said, “You stupid, ugly woman. I could kill you right now.” She peed herself, and blinked as a tear rolled down her huge nose. He gave a dumb, satisfied smile, showing bits of tobacco in his brown teeth. She could smell the hay and trees outside the open bedroom window, mixed with his body odor, which, like always, was a fermented, yeasty smell because of all the bread he ate. His doctor had asked more than once how much he drank, because of the smell. He didn’t drink at all, she’d said. He was merely intoxicated with buried fury and yeast.
She looked over at him, pointed a shaky finger at his bare, concave chest. “You do it now then,” she said, “because if you don’t kill me I’ll make you wish you had from now until forever.”
Of course he didn’t do it. He was never going to. He just wanted to see the look on her face when he produced the secret, black gun and held it to her head. Would she pray then?
Not at all.
She did make him regret it though. Always and forever.
All of the gossipy women in town reached out to her when the business closed and her husband went back to the city, leaving her and the children alone in the country while he got things settled, again. The past in reverse, again. How was it that she was the one who remained, stranded in her husband’s rural dream? The women came by smiling, bringing dense foods to console her. One in particular—the widowed prison guard with spiky red hair, standing so tall she had to look down at nearly everyone—ordered the wife to stay with her after the official eviction date.
When the husband finally called for her this time, the wife said no thank you.
She grew to love the prison guard dearly, and the prison guard loved her, though not in any sexual way, unfortunately. The wife let the husband think what she knew he would until his memory was consumed. He’d already decided that any woman not obviously flattered by his attention was a homosexual. The world, it turned out, was full of rude lesbians, insisting they open their own car door and carry their own groceries, insulted by an honest compliment from an assertive man. The wife had discovered the kind of retribution that would keep on giving without her having to do much at all, the kind he could enact all on his own, in the privacy of his boring nights as he roamed aimlessly around his cluttered apartment, listening to the distressing noise of cars and gunshots and neighbors yelling, in that city he used to know so well but no longer understood, being too old and entitled to comprehend the longing or poverty or bound-up rage of anyone more complicated than himself.
When the wife began to bleed occasionally from her nose and eyes, her friend made her nettle tea. The old doctor at the clinic appeared nervous before the lab results, eventually referring her to the doctor in the city. Her friend came in with a paper bag full of nettle leaves she’d picked in an abandoned lot across the street. She dumped them carefully into a pot of boiling water on the stove. It made the house smell like dead plants. She strained the leaves from the golden water through a metal sieve into a mason jar. They drank it together on the sofa while watching Matlock. It was hard to tell if it did any good, but it tasted nice, like rain and rot, and it made the wife feel content.
When she saw the Christian lady again, many years later, they were in the Dollar General store. The wife and her friend were cackling at each other, trying on stupid hats in front of a small, warped mirror affixed to the sunglasses kiosk. The lady appeared like a distortion between their grinning reflections. She was reaching for an item she could hardly grasp on a high shelf. The wife turned around, as if searching out something, to watch the lady feebly lifting a giant can into her cart. She had aged tremendously, her wide back hunched and her hair so thin the scalp was shining beneath the harsh lights of the store. The wife had read in the newspaper last winter how the man had fallen over in the driveway at night and froze to death, and of course she’d read about the church scandal. It wasn’t exactly satisfaction she felt. She had to admit there were things she’d never considered about the couple:
1. That they hadn’t wanted to sell the business in the first place. That the church had forced them. Everyone in the congregation had liquidated their personal assets in preparation for an apocalypse. The pastor had charged himself with the obligation of constructing an underground haven where they could all await the Second Coming. No haven was ever constructed. The money disappeared and the pastor was in prison. It was not long after that the sexual abuse allegations came out, regarding the children attending the private school.
2. The couple didn’t know how to trust anyone. How could they? They’d worked their whole lives for something and lost it. Being lied to had made them liars too.
She couldn’t stop herself from following the lady out into the parking lot, where she labored again with a case of canned food beside her car. The wife approached softly. “Let me help you with that, please,” she said. The lady didn’t look up. She stayed fixed on the difficult task.
“No thank you,” she said blankly, without any sign of recognition.
The wife reached out. “That’s too bad, because I’ve already decided I’m going to help you,” she said, taking the heavy load.
The Book-Eating Ceremony
Rage loiters in me, like those welfare mothers always on the Internet at the public library. Dating sites is what they’re doing. My rage is similar: ignorant and sexual. I have degrees, sure. Though I will say, none of them are in frames—such a tacky, insecure ethos. Recently,
as an excuse to leave town for a few days, I attended the Women’s Cultural Studies Convention in Grand Rapids. Immediately I was depressed. The hotel decor was too menacing, the wallpaper a tableau of shaggy oxen flanked by rosebuds resembling human livers. The women used too many words, were all fetishists of their own bad ideas, constantly scribbling in the margins of everything: New books, obscure journals, takeout menus. “Marginalia,” they liked to say. “Your marginalia is extensive!” or “Pardon me, I wasn’t trying to peek at your marginalia!” Like scientists in a singles bar. The self-satisfied jargon. The pretend poetry.
Shit and fall back in it. Just give me the goddamned discourse.
The keynote speaker was an astounding bitch. Premier pornography scholar and behavioral theorist Trisha Gregory. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a runty, rat face. Her hair was a tangle of frizzed chestnut with a patch of white that fell over one eye, like she was an erotic villain. During her address she pointed at people, delivered degrading analyses of everyone’s body language. The topic was “Performative Proximity.” I’d never heard of it either. The audience squirmed and giggled, until it was their turn. Several walked out of the old red hall with their arms gruffly crossed, prompting Trisha to serenely whisper into her little microphone, “Take note of the closed posturing as the offended exit the room. One might assume they’re asserting a dominant stance, but this configuration only serves to further demonstrate the rawness of their vulnerability.” The microphone was very close to her mouth. The words hissed through the hall like a mechanical snake.
Afterward, in the lounge, I drank too much. Trisha was there, reveling in her own disdain, surrounded by a gaggle of elderly lesbians. I wedged between them to order more wine. “Audacious presentation!” I said, not meaning to sound so enthusiastic. She smoked a long, black cigarette and stared at a painting on the wall of a woman wearing a dress made of parrots. I reached out to shake her hand. I mentioned my own research. It came out strewn and incompetent. I continued to blabber until I’d finished my merlot. She seemed exceptionally slim, right up to the hips, where she carried an alarming width that narrowed abruptly again after the knees. She said she needed to use the restroom. Something about the tone, the raise of her immense eyebrow, suggested I follow her. We went to her hotel room, where she offered me more wine and asked if I was into fisting.